As recent events have made all too clear, our society is deprived of ways to communicate honestly about sex, desire, and consent. One potential source of language comes from the words that turn us on. In this episode, T.C. and Betina discuss a range of sex languages: the bestselling romance novel, purely sexual pornography, and literary erotica, which offers a balance between the emotions, the mind, and the senses.

It’s exciting to get back in the swing of things with the Smutty Storytelling podcast! In this episode, Betina and I discuss a topic that’s interested us for a long time–the different “modes” of erotic storytelling (Betina calls them “Sex Languages”, which I love) and what experiences they offer readers. Let’s go beyond “I know it when I see it”! We offer recommendations and share our frustrations and our joys with each language. We also acknowledge some of the ways erotic writing can offer an opportunity to express desires and needs we’re not otherwise able to express, along with some of the risks of sex languages that don’t reflect real intimacy (in all its strengths and flaws) or offer a skewed perspective of human sexuality.

The one I want to point you to today is the Big Book of Submission Vol 2’s paperback release (on Barnes & Noble and Amazon)!

While each story is under 1,200 words, 69 of them add up to quite the package.

Speaking of kinky flash fiction and/or insights into power–weren’t we?–I also have a short but sweet piece up at Bare Back magazine:

I’ve always wanted to feel power. The thing itself, not its effects or trappings. The effects aren’t bad; like hell I’m going to protest getting what I want. But they’re not exactly what I want, if that makes sense. I don’t care so much about the symptoms, but I want the disease.

Power is a disease, as you always bring up at some point in our political-philosophical-spiritual conversations. I nod along to your sermon, which I do agree with. Power is killing the world with deaths of a thousand cuts, exploitation, extraction. But that’s not what I’m talking about when I talk about the power I want.

It’s not in the slinky black PVC dress, though it looks great on the model online, and neither is it in the fishnets barely visible under my thigh-high leather boots. The netting imprints a pattern on my skin for the rest of the night. I love how the boots gleam and hug my calves, but those heels—“Shouldn’t you be the one in a torture device?” I ask.

You’ve marched and signed petitions against torture, the real kind I mean, but our conversations never get lost in that particular labyrinth. It makes so much difference when it’s consensual that it takes an effort to connect the two meanings of the word. Also, you don’t preach half as much when we’re playing—fucking with power.

Your hands rub my aches away. There’s a special energy in that, in your hands moving warm and firm over my heels, my ankles, up to my diamond-stamped thighs. Your touch somehow reaches into my flesh, soothing and exciting at once, and all at my command.

Still, this was just costuming. Turning me into someone else, or at least the imitation of her. It can make me feel freer or more obvious, but it’s not a source of true power. True power I’ll be able to feel in complete nakedness. True power I keep searching for, and you let me mark and bind your flesh into a map.

I’ll have more fresh updates in the next week–the next episode of the Smutty Storytelling podcast, in which Betina Cipher and I discuss erotic genres and ‘sex languages”; and a unique story in the Dancing With Myselfanthology of “self-love” erotica!

Book alert: the Red Velvet and Absintheanthology is currently on sale at 10% of its original price (99 cents instead of $9.99)!

This anthology of Gothic erotic fiction is quite possibly the best book of erotica I’ve ever read. I’m not in it, but you might say it’s in me. Every piece is lush and dazzling, with a diversity of orientations, kinks, and dynamics between couples. Some stories lean more toward romance, some toward horror, some toward pure smut. There are classics like vampires and werewolves (reimagined in interesting new ways) and some stranger encounters with enchanted–or haunted–paintings, a hangman, and a dom who might be the Green Fairy herself.

I didn’t plan it this way, but I have three flash fiction publications this month and they’re all pretty wonderfully perverse. So it’s a great time to work out the end-of-year tension and get your freak on in under 2,000 words.

Today, my short piece “The Depths of You” goes live at the Erotic Review magazine. A little long to be technically flash fiction, it’s a sort of prose poem about why it can be scary to use a strap-on:

Performance anxiety? Sure, some. But I’m good at what I do to you. I know it. I know just the depth, rhythm, angle to take you apart. Then to pull you back together, so you burst again. All the while driving into you towards my own pleasure, my own ascent and plummet into something dark, full, and for each moment, enough.

Somewhere in that helpless satisfaction is the thing that scares me so fucking much.

It’s better, sometimes, when you’re not facing me. When it’s just sensation. Our bodies slide with the same motions, friction traveling along the length of the silicone cock inside you to my clit, and that’s all we share. An encompassing awareness that we only need to feel. Not something to think about or communicate or soften with kisses. I hear your gasps and moans but your breath falls on the pillow; I don’t feel its wet heat lick my face. I don’t look into your eyes and drop into them, those beautiful dark bottomless pits.

But the kinky December fun doesn’t end there! I also have a piece in The Big Book of Submission, Volume 2, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel and coming out December 19. It’s titled “First Slap”:

“Can I slap you?”

He was struck by how she asked the question. Clearly, but softly, revealing not shyness but a sort of respect for the request’s significance. It was the same way she had suggested their first kiss, resolving his private uncertainty over the nature of a conversation which had grown steadily warmer and more intimate.

Lastly, a longer flash piece with a bondage theme, “Outnumbered,” will be part of New Zealand-based erotic journal Aotearotica, Volume 4.

They’ve been going at it for almost an hour—just the two of them, one on one, but really, she’s got him outnumbered. The cuffs help.

He strains at them suddenly, so hard the bedposts groan. She chuckles. They’ll hold. He’d hold, too, even if in the moment he doesn’t realize it. She slows down, giving him more space to ask for anything he needs. If he isn’t too proud.

Silence. She goes back to what she’s doing, riding out his reaction. Under her he bucks, trembles, struggles. A body in tension and frantic release.